SCIENCE VERSUS PLUCK (SVP) was authored by Howard Whitehouse almost ten years ago. We tried it once… Tony Figlia hosted a game in which he played the roll of the native commander, while we others, in command of a British column, tried to march up the field without being wiped out by Tony's units. SVP is what may be termed a 'one-sided-game'… players command their British units, and the gaming host tosses everything in the pot against them… fanatics and cavalry and fuzzy-wuzzies and rifle-bearing infantrymen, and so on. This time, one of Tony's friends, Kevin, hosted the game, and Tony joined us as a British commander. During the pre-game dice tossing, I tossed high and was permitted my choice of a role to play… I selected that of the commander of the British forces. And my first decision had to do with the initial disposition of the British force. There seemed to be no other choice other than to form a huge defensive 'box'… not quite a square, since we were too large a force to form square, but a big box. And why a box? Because I knew that over the horizon would soon come riding all the native forces in the world, and there was no way of knowing from which direction they would appear. At the beginning of each bound, our host, Kevin, would announce "This will be a 3 minute bound", or a 2-minute bound, etc. By defining the time encompassed by the bound, he determined the basic move distances to be covered by all the troops. For example, within a 2-minute bound, I noted the natives moved some 6 inches forward. The umpire, therefore, could collapse the time frame of the bound, and hurry it forward... conversely, he could draw out the bound, and slow down the action. We British were intensely interested in the time frame per bound, because, in a sense, that defined our fire power. Each of the stands in our 10-stand units of British troops could toss a fire die (a 6-sided die) for every minute of fire time. For a 2-minute bound, therefore, the 10 stands could toss 20 dice. A toss of a 5 or a 6 (depending upon range) was a hit, and one target stand was removed. The kicker here, however, was that our units only had 10 minutes worth of fire power. Ammunition was limited, and units that had depleted their ammo stocks had to receive new rounds from the supply wagons, safely located (I thought) within the huge box. And so the battle started, and on to the board poured the native troops. But I thought that Kevin erred by bringing his troops on piecemeal, instead of grouping them into huge massed bands. This permitted the defending Brits a chance to blow away several units, and to catch their breath, instead of having to continuously defend against a never-ending swarm of enemy units. One of the SVP ploys is that the Brits can, when in trouble, have an "emergency response". Toss a die and see how well your unit reacts under pressure. I tried this once, and, due to a lousy die roll, wasn't too impressed with my "emergency response". In addition to my duties as British commander, I was in charge of the 48th Foot and a regiment of Ghurkas. I must admit that, under my tutalage, my boys performed well in the field. To my left, Bill Rankin's units, each time they engaged the natives, seemed to fall back or rout. And the same happened to my right. Only the Ghurkas and the 48th Foot held firm. The native unit that attacked and routed Bill Rankin's troops was a Sepoy regiment, well trained troops that, the umpire informed us, had just mutinied. They got a 'plus' in melee, and their 'plus' was enough to do the Rankineers in. But after Bill's troops ran, the Sepoys continued their forward advance and penetrated deeply into our huge British box. They approached our pack animals, carrying the supplies for the entire British force, and wiped them out. We British had three wagons full of ammunition, and the Sepoys captured one of them. A couple of bounds prior to the Sepoy break-in, I had ordered the ammunition wagons to be moved. My own brigade, the Ghurkas and the 48th Foot, protected one of the wagons, and the second was safely within the grasp of another brigade. The @#$%...! Sepoys captured the wagon that had hung behind. Even though we had lost all of our supplies, and one of our ammunition wagons, we were still a viable force. I thought we'd done pretty well, considering that the entire native population of Africa had moved in on us. It was about this time that Fred Haub, another British commander, made the cutting remark: "The next time you're offered a choice between the force commander and the man in charge of the baggage train, choose the baggage train!" I thought this was cruel and uncalled for... Kevin, the umpire, in deciding what he'd spring on us each bound, kept tossing quite a lot of 6-sided dice. We were never made privy to his secret dice tossing... we only got the results. For example, to the left of my Ghurka regiment was another British regiment of foot, which was attacked by the largest unit on the field... a band of native fanatics some 25 strong. The defending Brits fired and fired and fired at this unit as it approached. Couldn't seem to stop it. Each time the native unit took casualties, Kevin's secret dice tossing came into play... I assume the native unit was taking a morale check, but I never found out. All we saw was that the unit kept coming. Our SVP scenario proved quite entertaining. No one argued with the umpire... all decisions were his, and were final in nature. After the game, Fred and I discussed how the SVP techniques could be applied to other eras, i.e., having an umpire run one side single-handedly. Fred's thought was that it should be applied only to an era in which "melee troops" were predominant. You really didn't want a fire power game, you wanted lots of hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps we'll come up with an ancients version of SVP. Back to PW Review April 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com